In the year of the World Cup and with its major competitor sponsoring it, Heineken wanted to make something really big for the UEFA Champions League. The brand had already launched the “Share the Drama” concept and our briefing was to create a brand experience that was able to prove that watching a match is as exciting as watching a drama movie. However, at the same time, we needed to be relevant enough to make people grab their phones and spread the message.

Heineken wanted to prove that watching a UEFA Champions League match is as exciting as watching a great drama movie, so we organized an orchestra to play live during the finals in an event for 2,500 people, exactly as it was in the silent film era. For each move, a different soundtrack was improvised by 35 musicians in real-time, from corner kicks to substitutions. The orchestra was conducted by Xuxa Levy, a classical maestro, and Ronaldinho Gaúcho, the “ginga” maestro.

We launched the event announcing the first musical match in history and showed Ronaldinho Gaúcho during auditions on digital pills. This made the tickets to be sold out in record time and helped us to create partnerships with several influencers that made real-time coverage together with the brand, making the event relevant for fans and, therefore, to the press.

First, we invited Ronaldinho Gaúcho to be our “maestro” and launched an audition to select some musicians with the right “ginga” to improvise live during the UEFA Champions League final match. Then, we created an event for 1,500 people, announcing the first musical match in history, and the tickets were sold out within two hours. At the meantime, another maestro, Xuxa Levy, created different soundtracks for each game move and rehearsed them with the musicians in the weeks before the game. In the big day, corner kicks, substitutions, goals, and even yellow cards were intensified by the music.

Our communication goals were to increase brand preference, which we enhanced from 8 to 12%, and to grow penetration achieving once again a 5% growth compared to the previous year. But The Grand Finale was also a blockbuster in other areas. People really loved it and spread it digitally on all social networks. For the first time, Heineken reached 38 million organic impacts on Instagram Stories and, with 88 million media exposures, it became national news. The video case telling the whole story had 300k interactions and 300 million views, becoming Heineken’s most-viewed ad in history.